Questions About App Stores

I have some questions about App Studio, and I can't find the answers on the ESRI product page. I've been developing my company's website using our ArcGIS Server and the ArcGIS Javascript API. I've created interactive maps and geoprocessing tools that return reports and charts to users based on map clicks. We want to start to expand these offerings to mobile devices, and we're looking at investing App Studio for ArcGIS Standard. I'm wondering about making apps available for sale. Would we be restricted only to certain app stores (Apple, Google, Microsoft) or could we sell them in any app store? Do we have to have an ArcGIS online account to use App Studio? We do not currently have an account, we do everything from our ArcGIS Server.

-Would we be restricted only to certain app stores (Apple, Google, Microsoft)?

No, you are free to add them to any store as along as the store supports Windows, Linux, Mac, iOS or Android apps.

Do we have to have an ArcGIS online account to use App Studio?

AppStudio desktop is a cloud based solution to build, share and upload your apps within your org. You need either an ArcGIS Online Org account or a ArcGIS portal account to start building using AppStudio. You can integrate your server content to ArcGIS Online or Portal easily. Which means your data and services can continue to host on ArcGIS Server but the apps need to hosted on ArcGIS online or the Portal account.

Actually you could build apps locally using AppStudio Local Make tool. In order to use Local Make you need to have the build environment set up. Please refer to this doc on how to set up the dev environment.